Tag Archives: queer folk

What I meant, yesterday, by it adds up, is that I’ve got at least 100 pages of usable material — and I’m not even through all the backlog yet. 100 pages of writing that will work for these couple of book projects; that doesn’t include the writing that could be worked for creative submissions, poems or short fictions.

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Last night we watched part of Angels in America, the movie — just part one. I am trying to remember that time, late 80s, when everyone was going to die from having sex. Sex became something even more important to avoid. In the 80s I was living in Omaha. Gays had AIDS. People who went to the hospital got AIDS. I lived in Omaha, where no one got AIDS. I didn’t know anyone who was sick — it was on all the magazines, on tv, and of course, les taught us about it. What do I want to say about all this? It seemed removed. It seemed like something that would happen to me. It seemed necessary, having to pay so much attention to sex; we did it all the time. For a long time After, after I broke contact with him, I thought it was a wonder that we didn’t get sick, me and my sister, given that he was having sex with both of us and mom & who knows who else?

AIDS was this defining cultural event for my generation — we already knew to wear condoms because teen pregnancy had already been a big deal. AIDS seemed far away but lurking, too. Possible. Vague. I figured I was in the clear, first because I thought I was straight, then because I was having sex with women. After I went off to college, I got tested regularly. I’m sure I got tested first because I wanted to have sex with some boyfriend, so we could stop using condoms. Then I went every 6 months for a long time after that. I was fooling around with bi boys — they could get it; that was the story. Bi boys– those were the ones bringing AIDS to the gay male & straight women communities. That’s what the fear and panic was. Biphobia gone ballistic. Did les ever get tested? Why, of all people couldn’t he have died of it?

People were wearing gloves to touch their children in the hospital, they were platsticking up. In college, I participated in safer sex trainings, teaching us how to have hotter sex using plastic wrap, dental dams, condoms. We needed to wrap it up. I didn’t learn about AIDS up close and persoal, just third and fourth-hand. Someone at school maybe got it, maybe killed himself after he was diagnosed. Even in the early 90s, it was a terrible death sentence.

It’s still seen as a gay disease, even thoiugh, the world over, it’s mostly heterosexual acting-and-appearing people who have it now. Regan, the Right Wing, the conservatives — they branded AIDS completely as that fag sickness. Why am I writing about this? I want to remember — it was just another thing to be afraid of when it came to sex. There was nothing I wasn’t afraid of about sex. Still, that feeling and fear lifts up and around me, it’s present in my body, in my desire, around the longing for dirtiness, for mess; skin-to-skin became a fetish. I’m lost in this. What did les say about AIDS? He’d use it against us, then tell us we had nothing to worry about. That was his way. There was Ryan White, he was normal — not gay. There was how I expected, somewhere underneath, that all my gay male college friends would die. None of them did — we were all protected, isolated. How did that happen? Were we all too scared to get risky?

It feels like a long time ago, and something so far away. When did things shift? In the late 90s? I never knew anyone on the cocktail, didn’t watch anyone die of the disease. Just read about and with those who did. That wasn’t the holocaust I was a part of — I was part of the other one, the one that sang Take Back The Night songs, the one that railed in the night and in small therapy groups holding stuffed animals. I was a part of that epidemic instead. I appreciated having the safer sex community to escape to — we could get angry without shame, could proudly proclaim sex as possible and ours, could talk about safety and latex boundaries, though we didn’t always talk about other boundaries. This wasn’t incest. This was something people gathered in huge numbers to shout about, marched on Washington for, died-in for, demanded change around. People didn’t do that about incest, even though incest and rape killed people, too, and affected almost everyone I knew in one way or another. This was my plague.

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There’s more in here. What do you remember? Where were you during the first part of the AIDS crisis? Where were your characters? Take 10 or 15 minutes and write it out — write the parts you don’t tell all the time, what you were afraid of, what you were proud of, who you loved then, and why.

Thank you for the layers of your survival, for your standing up for others, for your words.

(Let me say that I’m sad that this now appears to be an HRC-sponsored production across the country — this post is not sponsored by the HRC.)

I want to tell you about how, in the early 90s, national coming out day felt like something very queer. Coming out, then, felt like a threat: like our families’ and home communities’ complacency were threatened by our outness, and, like we ourselves were threatened by being out.

Nowadays, living here in ostensible-queer-mecca, it’s easy to sink into a sense that things are settled and we are all safe: we’re here, queer, and they’re used to us.

And yes, much has changed — but not so much that it still doesn’t matter that we are honest about who we are, about who we have been and can be. Coming out still matters, for all of us. Our silence — how many times will she have to remind us — will not save us. It will not save our friends or families or our kids.

So, in case you didn’t know, I’m a queer person, a Kinsey 4.5-5 (on the sliding scale) (Also: would that this page could have used the word bisexual, say, once, given that he designed a scale which shows that most of the world *is* not exclusively homo-or heterosexual-forever-and-ever-amen (i.e.,there are very few “gold star” gays or straights), but that’s a different post). I have had and will forevermore have a sexual, sensual and erotic life that twists and turns and swirls and dances around and with folks of all genders and sexualities. I am married to my gay trans-butch beloved. I am not boxable into either HRC’s or Focus on the Family’s sex or gender categories.

It matters that we share this information with each other. If you have ever been attracted to or imagined you could be attracted to someone of the same sex or gender, it matters that you pass this information on to the people around you, and yes, to the young folks around you. They need to know that they’re not evil because of the sex or gender of the person they desire, and because they look up to you, because they see you as a role model, your coming out will make their world (and thus our world) a better place.

And I’m going to call on the allies: Are you a straight-identified person who has loved someone of the same sex, or has imagined loving someone of the same sex? So, maybe you won’t come out today: but maybe, when a young person (or an older person!) trusts you enough to worry to you about being shunned or hated because they are sexually attracted to folks of the same sex or gender, maybe you won’t be so quick to categorize them. You’ll maybe open a little more space in your heart, and thus, in your conversation with them — you’ll open more space for them to live and breathe into. You’ll explain/remind that the vast majority of people have had some attraction or curiosity about people of all sexes or genders, and that if this means hell, then you’ll be with them there in that hell: along with most of the rest of humanity.

Please choose today (and then tomorrow, to) to stand up to and call out anti-queer or anti-gender-nonconforming bullshit (whether from your straight or gay friends).

No previous experience necessary! Pre-registration required. Fee: $50-100,sliding scale (Please check in with us if funds are an issue—payment plans arealways possible, and we may be able to work out trades or other arrangementsas well!) Please write to jennifer@writingourselveswhole.org to register.

What if we could truly experience empathy for our bodies as they are – andthen, by extension, for ourselves, as we are?

As queer, genderqueer & trans survivors with a wide array of backgrounds andidentities in a sexuality-/gender-restrictive culture, our self-protectivetendency can be to “check out” by detaching mind from body to such greatdegrees that it can be dangerous. Physical activity and writing are two waysto check back in with your embodied self.

With deep respect for the privacy and variety in our personal experience ofgender expression and our individual histories, this workshop will create safespace for participants to embrace our bodies as they are, and to write thestories our bodies have been wishing to speak, while allowing possibility forthe integration of identity and physical presence. Using brief writingexercises and low impact body mindfulness exercises derived fromimprovisational theater, Zen meditation practice, and the internal Chinesemartial arts, participants will have the opportunity to fully embody ourgender complexity in a healing and playful environment.

The exercises we practice can be easily incorporated into our daily lives andcan enhance our ability to reflect mindfully on our experiences, whileinteracting with others from a place of self-acceptance, internal power, andconfidence, as we move through the world as the fabulously feisty queer &gender warriors we are…________________________________________

Your facilitators:

Alex Cafarelli is a Jewish genderqueer femme trauma survivor with a backgroundin 17 years of martial arts training. Currently teaching body mindfulnessclasses in Oakland, Alex also works as a gardener specializing indrought-tolerant and edible landscapes, does Reiki/massage bodywork, anddevelops and leads element-based rituals to support women, queers, transfolk,and genderqueers in moving through transitions and healing from trauma. CntactAlex at petals_and_thorns@yahoo.com.

Jen Cross is a queer incest survivor and a widely-anthologized writer who hasfacilitated survivors and sexuality writing workshops since 2002. She offerstwo weekly AWA-method workshops (Write Whole: Survivors Write and DeclaringOur Erotic) in San Francisco. Fnd out more about Jen atwritingourselveswhole.org or write her at jennifer@writingourselveswhole.org.

The more comfortable I get with my girlhood, after seriously striving to embody masculinity for almost a decade, the less able I am to describe it — girlhood — with any kind of precision: Well, a girl’s a female-bodied person, unless she’s male-bodied, and she likes dresses and pink unless she hates them and prefers skinned knees and tree climbing or none of the above or all. Well, it’s clear, isn’t it, that the girl’s the softer one, right? Except I’ve stroked some pretty soft boys — and met girls rocked hard like stone and the girls are the ones who cry right except when they don’t and the boys do and I’m done with layering on description and definition: femininity likes frills and adornment and paint and frivolity up to and until and unless and and it digs its unpainted nails into thick rocky soil or, yes, knows perfectly well how to turn a phrase between a girl’s or a boi’s legs and sings its songs with abandon until and unless it remains silent.

There’s no sure thing about femininity and masculinity for me anymore — not about either except in the know-it-when-i-see-it sorts of ways and even that is all up for interpretation and assumption, those kinds of grabs. The things that say boys are strong and girls get carried have never seen me (or you, or him, or hir) carry a box of books wearing four-inch heels and who cares if its girl or not except

I do. I thicken into the femininity my stepfather wrought for me, the tough bitch smart broad high femme ball buster prima donna that he was always just the right man for: it’s that last part, of course, that leaves me nauseous, that wrote me into boyhood, into all the masculinity I’d always already carried, all my life — they just called it tomboy but I took it out of my back pocket, fluffed it out, slicked it on and called that leather jacket and jeans and boots and shorn shorn head strong and safe

girlhood was the stuff that smeared his palms and yes, greased his chin, and I wanted to get myself far away from the staining thing that I had been. I drove a straight sharp line down between butch and femme, masculine and feminine, girl and boy and always I meant to bend myself toward the unlayerable side, unbreakable side, unbroad side, ungirl side. ‘Cause boy is always and only not girl, right? We can say that at least for sure,

right?

Not in the world I come from, the dancers I live within, who question every frilly tail-marker under a genderqueering microscope. Some boys will be boys and girls will be women but other girls stripe their butts with Marilyn Monroe panties and dance on the stage with barbells in each hand and some boys like to bend at the waist when they sob or lay open to the receiving they were never supposed to want and all the lists of what’s feminine and what’s masculine just ends up being make believe or stereotype for me now, jogging my memory around what the folks outside the Bay Area Bubble say is good for gooses and ganders. It’s longing for play I frill into, glitter that doesn’t stain the eye and a kind of strong-fisted handshake that makes a grown butch do a double take.

We make our own lists every day anyway, stripped around society’s damage, and when we come back home now and again, the bois will be girls will be femmes will be right

Thursday night at the phenomenal Girl Talk: A Cis & Trans Woman Dialogue, curated by Julia Serano and Gina de Vries, Ryka Aoki de la Cruz talked about family, about how if we’re family how can we ‘outreach’ to each other? Families who’ve been separated have reunions, not outreach — it was brilliant (as were each of the other performances shared at that show) and of course there were many more points she made and images she shared in her piece…

And this one, though, sticks in me — sticks in my troubles — the way performers talk about family sometimes, how we should treat each other more like family, meaning we should treat each other better, more kindly, with more open hearts, right? I guess that’s how my inside hopeful heartsick places interpret that phrase.

But I think we do treat each other like family, already, unfortunately. ‘Cause what are our experiences of family? We drop one another when it’s expedient, we shut each other out and off. We take sexual advantage and then turn our backs. Isn’t that family?

I get tired (and by tired I mean heartbroken-sad) of hearing about family like it should be understandable, like by referencing family as a metaphor for unconditional-yet-complicated love and acceptance, I will understand what that means. But I don’t. My history of family is retracted love, pure and unabashed abandonment, extremely painful attempts at reconnection across severed ties — and now we’re supposed to make family together, you and me, we in these queer communities, and family, to me, looks like the horrifying inbred, yes, incestuous (and I use that metaphor deliberately) difficult raw puritanical stuff we have created and find ourselves struggling against.

‘Cause I understand what she’s talking about (how we don’t outreach to family — so how are you going to talk about ‘outreaching’ to queer folks of color, for example, to transwomen, to the others who are ‘underrepresented’ at the mainstream white queer gatherings that many of us find ourselves participating in), and I love it with all the inside webs of my heart.

But/And, also — we need a different word.

I understand about needing replacements, about using and reclaiming ‘family’ to mean queer sisterbrothers and brothersisters, but we bring with that word all the baggage that shaped us crooked and raw and bent and ashamed and scarred. We carry into that word, and this new collection of people we’re trying to connect with, all the pain that that word learned to bear, all the while we were learning to keep ourselves alive within its bounds, until it was gone.

How do we make ‘family’ good? How can we engender that word into something worthwhile, settle into it with a sense of hope instead of trepidation? You say we are family — to me that means there is no hope between us, no common language, a warped tongue, an indelible severing. That’s where I grow out of.

Not outreach but reunion. Maybe this truth of family is the way of all of us, and reunion will be painful alongside possible, as much as when I return to my blood family and see the shapes that crafted me and feel cup around my face each pair of arms and every set of hands that released me into the grip of a monster. Is that how we feel each other — that we sisters and brothers and others haven’t stood up for each other enough, haven’t protected each other enough, haven’t sent enough letters or enough I Miss You cards, or called enough to hear how your life is, to hear how he blessedness flows and hear how the hurts hit you and how can I share in both?

I don’t do those parts very well, I’ll admit it, the reaching out. She says we don’t outreach to family, and I get her meaning, and and and — I always feel like it’s an outreach when I try to touch anyone with a tie to my insides: old friends, blood family — a tentative feeling those lines: Are we still connected? Have you dropped me yet?

More and more thinking on this to come … so many thanks to you, Ryka, for these considerations, this possibility, your words!

Are you looking for an opportunity to create some new and powerful writing in an invigorating, supportive writing community? This June and July, Writing Ourselves Whole is pleased to be offering two full 8-week writing workshops and a Saturday writing retreat:

Write Whole: Survivors Write. Monday evenings, June 1 – July 27. Open to all women survivors of sexual trauma.

Declaring Our Erotic: Take back your sexuality! Tuesday evenings, June 2 – July 28. Open to queer-identified women survivors of sexual trauma.

Raw Silk, an erotic writing retreat open to all women! Saturday, June 20, 10am-4pm.

Many who are survivors of sexual trauma feel fragmented or disjointed and have come to believe we must always live our lives this way. Writing is one way to regain some control over our experiences and memories, and begin to create new sense out of them.

Gather with other women survivors of sexual trauma in this workshop, and write in response to exercises chosen to elicit deep-heart writing, and deal with such subjects as: body image, family/community, sexuality, dreams, love, faith, and more. You’ll be encouraged to trust the flow of your own writing, and receive immediate feedback about the power of your words!

These workshops are open to all women who identify in as survivors of sexual trauma. Though we come together as survivors, we are never required to write any particular version of “our story,” or even write about trauma at all if we don’t choose to! In this space, you have the opportunity to write as you feel called to write.

Although the setting is a supportive one, the workshop is different from a “support group,” as the focus of the workshop itself is on each person’s writing; we create beauty out of the sometimes extraordinarily difficult stuff of our lives.

Declaring Our EroticEight Tuesday evenings, June 2 – July 28For Summer 09, this workshop is open to queer women survivors of sexual trauma

Take back your sexuality! Come together with other queer-identified women survivors to create a space in which we struggle with and celebrate our complex sexualities, in an attempt to become less isolated around, and more comfortable talking about, our sexual desires. Each week, we write in response to exercises designed to tap into different aspects of our sexual selves: memory, fantasy, experience, relationship with the body, and more!

You will get more comfortable exploring and talking about sexual desires, receive strong and focused feedback about your new writing, explore the varied and complex aspects of sexuality and desire in a fun and confidential environment, and, of course, try your hand at some explicit erotic writing!

Previous participants have found the group to be transformative, feeling that the work they’ve done has opened up and changed not only their relationship with their erotic selves, but with many other aspects of their lives as well.

Treat yourself to a day of good food, powerful writing and great community! In this AWA-method day-long writing retreat, you’ll have the opportunity to get more comfortable exploring and talking about sexual desires, celebrate the varied and complex aspects of your sexual self, and, of course, dive into some explicit erotic writing! Surprise yourself with the power of your sensual/erotic voice. You’ll end the day with a rich body of new creative writing and feedback from your peers about what’s already strong in your work.

For each of our all-day Saturday writing retreats, we gather in the morning for coffee and some home-baked breakfast, and then write through the rest of the morning. After a break for a light lunch, we keep on diving deep into our work through the afternoon! At the end of the day, we have some conversation about revising and editing our work, and we close by four.

All workshops are open to folks of all writing abilities: whether you write regularly, are an infrequent journaler, or used to write and would like to again, these groups are for you!

Our workshops held in San Francisco in an accessible space, a half-block from BART and on many MUNI lines. Spaces are still available, though limited, and pre-registration is required! Cost for full 8-week workshops is $250; fee for Saturday retreats is $100. Deposits are requested to reserve your space. To register or for more information, email jennifer@writingourselveswhole.org or visit www.writingourselveswhole.org!

Writing Ourselves Whole’s founder and facilitator, Jen Cross, is a freelance writer whose work has been published in close to thirty anthologies and periodicals, including Nobody Passes, Visible: A Femmethology, Best Sex Writing 2008, Best Women’s Erotica 2007, and many more. Jen has facilitated writing workshops since 2002. She received her MA in Transformative Language Arts from Goddard College, and is a certified facilitator of the Amherst Writers & Artists method (www.amherstwriters.com, as developed by Pat Schneider).

Founded in 2003, Writing Ourselves Whole seeks to change the world through writing. To open our hearts to ourselves and each other, so that we might live in a community of deep expressiveness and self-love, where each individual reaches his and her most complete self. We exist in the service of transforming trauma and/or struggles around sexuality into art, and creating spaces in which individuals may come to recognize the artist/writer within.

To express our own story changes the world. Writing is both memory and possibility at once, and in moving through and with that tension, we create change.

Sunflowers are golden. Tarnish is not golden, unless it’s on earrings that were too silvery shiny to begin with and they needed some dark – lilacs and freshly broken playground rocks and crocus blooming through the last of the winter snow and seeing the redbuds on the maple tree and trusting that Spring was really, actually, finally coming for real this time: all golden. Snowstorms in mid-April and a brown Christmas: not golden.

These are the nature things, the Midwest things, the snow shoe shallow things, the walking back home things.

Walking through love into a wall of fear is not golden but bursting that fear with one’s faith in oneself and thick love for one’s compatriots is so golden it’s liquid.

He asked me not to bring you because he’s afraid of how it’ll look if you show up there with me, all of my fierce queer family un our leather and pansy dresses and tattoos and brave dye jobs and outspokenness and brazen truth fever and strong flaring unflinching eyes, all of us and our hands locked with lovers or tricks, our hands outstretched toward the pale bodies of a town in the middle of Nebraska that’s not all that far, in philosophical terms, from where Brandon Teena was murdered.

He asked me to come alone, without you, and unspoken was: you can fix your hair nice and put on a black skirt and no one would be the wiser. He wanted me to leave you off the list of my grandmother’s mourners, you heavily-mascaraed boys and fine suit-n-tie wearing girls. He wanted me to put my politics on the slide and my love on the swing and let them occupy themselves while my naked shameful body said goodbye to the woman who taught me about steadiness and safety and comfort and rhubarb-strawberry pie.

He says that if the other mourners see you, they will forget what they were gathered for, they will forget the woman whose life they are at the United Methodist to celebrate and remember, they will turn away from her and focus only on you, on us, on all of us in our un-American oddity.

And I remind him that I have grown from the seed that she planted and they tended, this middlest of middle America, with their water and sunlight and locusts and lies, with their long farms and endless faith and foreverable silencings, with their protestant hymns and communal supers and casseroles brought to the homes of the ill and the dying and all the unspoken sorrows of 200 years of homesteading: I am the fruit of those labors, harvested. They cannot deny us our legacy or our home. They can consider us abnormal, but if we are of them, then we are as strawberry-rhubarb as they are.

I am tired of these transparencies lain over my life, the requests to just be in the closet a little while – as if the closets our families lived in weren’t the most hospitable breeding ground for abuse, as if I want to refabricate those conditions, as if I don’t want to bring some queer sunshine into my family’s hometown, some golden probability for the one or three queer kids still living there and seeing themselves reflected nowhere, living between the crosshatch of Brandon and Matthew, expecting the closet is their only refuge.

He says my grandmother would never ask, herself, that I hide you, and unspoken it’s always unspoken is the point that she would prefer it that way but I look through her photo albums and find, among all the images of grandchildren and their families, several pictures of me with my ex-wife, and I see my grandmother honoring who I am, who she silently, steadily, helps me to be.

I have the great privilege of being a part of the Body Heat: Femme Porn Tour, which kicks off here in San Francisco tomorrow, 4/3, at the Center for Sex and Culture at 7pm.

Femmes, as some of us know, still bear an interesting burden of invisibility — our right to call ourselves dykes is called into question sometimes even still, because we don’t bear the masculine markers of more “visible” dykes (which turns into an interesting paradox), and our sexual agency is still, I think, considered to be determined by our lovers, rather than by we ourselves.

There are LOTS of fierce femme writers & performers who are calling into question these and other misunderstandings around femmeness, and I get to be on tour with three of them — Vixen Noir (aka Veronica Combs of the incredible Liquid Fire fame), Celestina Pearl (di-va writer, filmmaker & performer!) and kathleen delaney (spoken word artist out of Atlanta & a dear friend from back when I lived on the East Coast!)

More info below — I’ll be blogging about the tour here and at my myspace blog: www.myspace.com/writingourselveswhole

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Our mission and vision

The mission: We offer safe, confidential writing groups to a broad cross-section of the community, and in particular to those who are living in the aftermath of intimate violences. We engage a non-clinical, transformative and communal approach for those living with and in the aftermath of trauma, and recognize that resurrecting our own language and stories is a necessary part of re-ordering ourselves after trauma.

The vision: Writing Ourselves Whole seeks to change the world through writing. We exist in the service of transforming struggle into art, turning isolation toward community, and creating spaces in which individuals may come to recognize the artist/writer within.

Our Fiscal Sponsor

Writing Ourselves Whole is a fiscally-sponsored project of the Intersection Incubator

What They’re Saying

I love the voices of every writer. Truly, I have been deeply fed by drinking in what others write. (I have thoroughly enjoyed writing too). I love this format and the safety created by your presence, heart, group structure, and everyone participating. ~Anonymous (Write Whole)